The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
by senawario
Summary: My "Harmonious" take on the classic James Thurber short story. Contains multiple pop culture references but also reflects my age (well past 50) I suppose.


**Summary** : I believe all adult males have a bit of Walter Mitty in them...

A/N 1: And if you're positive you don't, I probably have your share too ;-)

 **Disclaimers** :

I am not making any money out of this in any way whatsoever. Walter Mitty and other characters from the original short story belong to the estate of James Thurber (I imagine). The beauty of this story is such that I pretty much have to use some parts of it, otherwise it's no fun at all... so I did. No copyright infringement is intended, only homage to an awesome story and its author. A story which has allowed me personally to retain my sanity when I find myself in similar situations, think "what a jackass I am", then realise "no I'm not; I bet it happens to lots of people, otherwise Mr Thurber couldn't have written that story!"

Harry Potter and other characters from Rowling's books belong to J K Rowling and various other corporate giants.

Any remaining characters are mine. As a side note, a BIG thank you to JKR for making such a mess of the latter books and especially that epilogue; I firmly believe the HUGE number of fanfics for the HP series is mostly down to that; people are left feeling so... incomplete? uncomfortable? whatever... that they want to write something more sensible to feel good again.

Speaking for myself I firmly believe the last 3 were ghost written on her behalf. No one who wrote the brilliant books 1/2/3 could write 5/6/7.

 **Intro to the original story** : "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," first published in 1939, is an enormously funny short story. It's a classic just as much as any of the longer novels that the word "classic" might evoke in your mind, not least because you first laugh at Walter, and then you realise you're laughing at yourself!

If you have never heard of Walter Mitty, please stop right now and go find an online copy somewhere (probably "The New Yorker" website will have one) and read it before you continue here. Trust me, it's worth it. And it's quite short; shorter than this fic anyway!

Wikipedia also has an article about the classic, which has good background information, interpretations, etc. There's also a movie, but I have not seen it and it plays no role in this fic.

So here's my take on that beloved short story, as it might have been written if James Thurber had been a fanfic writer. Of course, Thurber would not be so unidimensional as to be influenced _only_ by the Harry Potter series :)

I also believe that the modern Mitty needs a partner. Someone very intelligent, brave, kind, loving, ...I could add more adjectives, or I could just name her: **Hermione**.

* * *

Hermione was worried. It wasn't working. It had been somewhat erratic lately, and she had reported it to McGonagall, but now she almost had tears in her eyes. She couldn't fail him _now_ of all times...

 _He_ didn't seem worried at all. She wondered if it had something to do with that whispered conversation with Dumbledore a few minutes ago. She had only caught the words "eighty eight" and, very oddly, something that sounded like "Brown-delirium adjustment", except the word wasn't "delirium".

"Mione, what are you wearing under your robes?" She blushed, but also looked shocked. He'd never flirted with her before, though she often wished he would, but was this the time to start...?

"J...jeans and t-shirt, Harry - why do you ask?". He shucked his robes - he was similarly dressed - and indicated she do the same. "The robes will get in the way, Mione..." He caught a hint of what she _thought_ he meant and blushed a little, but it was clear he was not flirting.

He walked to a dark corner just past the doors and touched something. His Firebolt appeared out of thin air, drawing a gasp from her. Harry took their robes and put them in the same corner, where they simply disappeared, but now she knew they were merely disillusioned.

"Hop on, Mione", Harry's voice was soothing. She was deathly afraid of flying, but he'd never made fun of her fear. He'd never even asked her to go flying with him, though she suspected he wanted to.

"It'll work, Mione. Dumbledore told me how to make it work if needed."

She still seemed hesitant. He drew her closer, snaked his arms under her's and up toward the back of her head, almost cradling her upper body comfortingly, and looked into her eyes. "Mione, do you trust me?" A short pause, then, "Mione, we have to reach a speed of eighty eight miles an hour for the time turner to start working again. I can't explain any more, but Dumbledore said it got... _reset_ in some way, and this was... the only way".

"Harry, I trust you with my life, but I'm scared... you know that".

"I'll take care of you, Mione..."; there was so much feeling in that simple statement, she hopped on before she had second thoughts.

She made sure the time turner was secure around her neck on its little chain, then put both her arms around him from behind and hugged him tight. He almost couldn't breathe... he'd never felt his chest constricted both from inside as well as outside.

He kicked off, and it was like he was a different person now. He was in his element here. He flew out of a window, turned a couple of times, dodged a few towers, then a few trees ( _showoff_ , thought Hermione, after her initial panic had settled a bit) and then, once over the lake, he flew along the edge, picking up speed quickly. He bent low to reduce drag, and Hermione bent with him. Faster and faster he went, to get up to the magic eight-eight miles an hour. . .

"Not so fast! You're driving too fast!" said Mrs. Mitty. "What are you driving so fast for?"

"Hmm?" said Walter Mitty. He looked at his wife, in the seat beside him, with shocked astonishment. She seemed grossly unfamiliar, like a strange woman who had yelled at him in a crowd. "You were up to fifty-five," she said. "You know I don't like to go more than forty. You were up to fifty-five." Walter Mitty drove on toward Waterbury in silence, the feeling of Hermione's hands around him fading in the remote, intimate airways of his mind.

"You're tensed up again," said Mrs. Mitty. "It's one of your days. I wish you'd let Dr. Renshaw look you over."

Walter Mitty stopped the car in front of the building where his wife went to have her hair done. "Remember to get those overshoes while I'm having my hair done," she said. "I don't need overshoes," said Mitty. She put her mirror back into her bag. "We've been all through that," she said, getting out of the car. "You're not a young man any longer." He raced the engine a little. "Why don't you wear your gloves? Have you lost your gloves?" Walter Mitty reached in a pocket and brought out the gloves. He put them on, but after she had turned and gone into the building and he had driven on to a red light, he took them off again. "Pick it up, brother!" snapped a cop as the light changed, and Mitty hastily pulled on his gloves and lurched ahead. He drove around the streets aimlessly for a time, and then he drove past the hospital on his way to the parking lot.

. . .Harry disapparated and started taking off the dragonhide gloves he now used all the time when on a field operation. He'd never realised how useful they would become when Hagrid had given them to him for his 20th birthday, very excited at his find. "There's a legend that they're from a very old, very tough, bird called Smaug, 'arry! So tough that only a bit 'o skin in 'is left breast were actually usable!"

(Curiously, legend also had it that the Hogwarts motto was derived from a saying coined by a long-forgotten wizard in Smaug's day, "Never laugh at live dragons".)

The Chief Healer's assistant met him at the apparation point. "He's in room 32 sir. It... looks bad."

Harry nodded sombrely. Lately he'd been seeing an unusual form of dark magic; they looked like knife wounds, but they were not like other muggle injuries. But he had been doing some reading and had an idea what it could be...

Not many people knew that the Chief of the Auror division was sometimes called in to St Mungos on difficult cases; long years of healing colleagues hit during field ops had made him almost better than even the Chief Healer, at least when it came to Dark wounds.

He walked in to room 32. If he felt a surge of emotion at seeing Arthur Weasley on the bed, he suppressed it completely, focusing on the small wound along Arthur's left shoulder. Only a few seconds, then he looked up and asked, "Got any Athelas in the potion store?"

"Kingsfoil? We probably do, but it's not used in any potions I know of..." The assistant ran off to get it, leaving the two Chiefs alone with the patient.

She ran to him and hugged him tightly, allowing herself a small sob. "Will he... make it Harry?"

"He will, Mione, he will, sweetheart", he murmured soothingly, patting her on the back. He kissed her gently on the top of her head; that always seemed to calm her down, he knew. It would not do to let the young girl see her chief in such an emotional state.

She sensed his confidence, and looked up at him, her worry fading into a hesitant smile. "Have you been hitting the libraries, Mr. Potter?", the pride in her voice was unmistakable.

"Well I guess you rubbed off on me, Mrs. Potter", laughed Harry.

He had his back to the door, and heard rather than saw the assistant come back, and they separated quickly but unhurriedly. Without turning, he held his hand out behind him to take the long leaves. . .

"Back it up, Mac! Look out for that Buick!" Walter Mitty jammed on the brakes. "Wrong lane, Mac," said the parking-lot attendant, looking at Mitty closely. "Gee. Yeh," muttered Mitty. He began cautiously to back out of the lane marked "Exit Only." "Leave her sit there," said the attendant. "I'll put her away." Mitty got out of the car. "Hey, better leave the key." "Oh," said Mitty, handing the man the ignition key. The attendant vaulted into the car, backed it up with insolent skill, and put it where it belonged.

They're so damn cocky, thought Walter Mitty, walking along Main Street; they think they know everything. Once he had tried to take his chains off, outside New Milford, and he had got them wound around the axles. A man had had to come out in a wrecking car and unwind them, a young, grinning garageman. Since then Mrs. Mitty always made him drive to the garage to have the chains taken off. The next time, he thought, I'll wear my right arm in a sling; they won't grin at me then. I'll have my right arm in a sling and they'll see I couldn't possibly take the chains off myself. He kicked at the slush on the sidewalk. "Overshoes," he said to himself, and he began looking for a shoe store.

When he came out into the street again, with the overshoes in a box under his arm, Walter Mitty began to wonder what the other thing was his wife had told him to get. She had told him, twice, before they set out from their house for Waterbury. In a way he hated these weekly trips to town-he was always getting something wrong. Kleenex, he thought, Squibb's, razor blades? No. Toothpaste, toothbrush, bicarbonate, cardorundum, initiative and referendum? He gave it up. But she would remember it. "Where's the what's-its-name," she would ask. "Don't tell me you forgot the what's-its-name." A newsboy went by shouting something about the Waterbury trial.

. . . "Perhaps this will refresh your memory." Harry held out what looked vaguely like a deluminator to Lucky Leiter, his American counterpart. "Seriously, I thought you guys kept up with muggle technology a lot better than we did", he smirked.

"This isn't muggle tech, James", Lucky Leiter drawled. His parents hadn't named him Lucky - that was just a loose translation of his Latin name; the Americans weren't very formal. And for some reason Lucky insisted on calling Harry by his middle name. Curious, but hey that's America for you!

There was something funny going on in muggle New York, and the American wizards, normally so "hep" with muggle tech, were at a loss. There seemed to be a series of unexplained phenomena with subtle magical signatures, yet there was not a witch or wizard in sight, nor any goblin, house elf, or anything else. And each time a wizard or a witch had been dispatched to look into it, they'd come back obliviated.

Except... even the obliviation seemed to have the same strange magical signature.

There was a quiet undercurrent of worry among the higher echelons of American wizardry. Nothing bad had happened yet; indeed, it could be argued that these strange magical beings seemed to be on the good side. In desperation, they'd called Harry and his partner, Hermione. There wasn't a more accomplished occlumens in the world than Harry, and they were hoping he would be able to come through one of the investigations with his memory intact. Not to mention his wife was about the only witch who could probably figure out what the hell was going on in the first place!

They had come through. Almost. He had been hit pretty badly at the jewelry store where the last "incident" had occurred, but he remembered a heck of a lot more than anyone else did. He'd seen the extremely well-dressed muggles obliviate a whole street full of people using that deluminator-like object (which Harry had quietly accio'd to himself when the man was distracted taking off his dark sunglasses).

Harry was even alert enough to follow them to a small locksmith's shop in Queens. There was a tall, cadaverous man standing around doing nothing. Next to him was the ugliest dog he'd ever seen. Harry was dimly conscious of wondering "who the hell names a dog 'Frank' anyway?" . . .

"Puppy biscuit," said Walter Mitty. He stopped walking and the buildings of Waterbury rose up out of the misty courtroom and surrounded him again. A woman who was passing laughed. "He said 'Puppy biscuit'," she said to her companion. "That man said 'Puppy biscuit' to himself." Walter Mitty hurried on. He went into an A&P, not the first one he came to but a smaller one farther up the street. "I want some biscuit for small, young dogs," he said to the clerk. "Any special brand, sir?" The greatest occlumens in the world thought a moment. "It says 'Puppies Bark for It' on the box," said Walter Mitty.

His wife would be through at the hairdresser's in fifteen minutes, Mitty saw in looking at his watch, unless they had trouble drying it; sometimes they had trouble drying it. She didn't like to get to the hotel first; she would want him to be there waiting for her as usual. He found a big leather chair in the lobby, facing a window, and he put the overshoes and the puppy biscuit on the floor beside it. He picked up an old copy of Liberty and sank down into the chair. "Can Germany Conquer the World Through the Air?" Walter Mitty looked at the pictures of bombing planes and of ruined streets.

 **A/N: this segment doesn't age well; it's way way older than Harry, but I'm going to ignore that.**

 **Worse, I have so far been unable to come up with a good substitute for the next segment. So this is verbatim from the original for now, until I manage to think up something!**

. . . "The cannonading has got the wind up in young Raleigh, sir,â€ said the sergeant. Captain Mitty looked up at him through tousled hair. "Get him to bed," he said wearily. "With the others. I'll fly alone." "But you can't, sir," said the sergeant anxiously. "It takes two men to handle that bomber and the Archies are pounding hell out of the air. Von Richtman's circus is between here and Saulier." "Somebody's got to get that ammunition dump," said Mitty. "I'm going over. Spot of brandy?" He poured a drink for the sergeant and one for himself. War thundered and whined around the dugout and battered at the door. There was a rending of wood and splinters flew through the room. "A bit of a near thing," said Captain Mitty carelessly. "The box barrage is closing in," said the sergeant. "We only live once, Sergeant," said Mitty with his faint, fleeting smile. "Or do we?" He poured another brandy and tossed it off. "I never see a man could hold his brandy like you, sir," said the sergeant. "Begging your pardon, sir." Captain Mitty stood up and strapped on his huge Webley-Vickers automatic. "It's forty kilometers through hell, sir," said the sergeant. Mitty finished one last brandy. "After all," he said softly, "what isn't?" The pounding of the cannon increased; there was the rat-tat-tatting of machine guns, and from somewhere came the menacing pocketa-pocketa-pocketa of the new flame-throwers. Walter Mitty walked to the door of the dugout humming "AuprÃ‹s de Ma Blonde." He turned and waved to the sergeant. "Cheerio!" he said. . .

Something struck his shoulder. "I've been looking all over this hotel for you," said Mrs. Mitty. "Why do you have to hide in this old chair? How did you expect me to find you?" "Things close in," said Walter Mitty vaguely. "What?" Mrs. Mitty said. "Did you get the what's-its-name? The puppy biscuit? What's in that box?" "Overshoes," said Mitty. "Couldn't you have put them on in the store?" "I was thinking," said Walter Mitty. "Does it ever occur to you that I am sometimes thinking?" She looked at him. "I'm going to take your temperature when I get you home," she said.

They went out through the revolving doors that made a faintly derisive whistling sound when you pushed them. It was two blocks to the parking lot. At the drugstore on the corner she said, "Wait here for me. I forgot something. I won't be a minute." She was more than a minute. Walter Mitty lighted a cigarette. It began to rain, rain with sleet in it. He stood up against the wall of the drugstore, smoking . . . He put his shoulders back and his heels together. "To hell with the handkerchief," said Walter Mitty scornfully. He took one last drag on his cigarette and snapped it away. Then, with that faint, fleeting smile playing about his lips, he faced the firing squad; erect and motionless, proud and disdainful, Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last.


End file.
